Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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Название: Fair Exotics
Автор: Rajani Sudan
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Языкознание
Серия: New Cultural Studies
isbn: 9780812203769
isbn:
The problems with the maternal, the xenophobic, the colonial, and the romantic body by no means end with the advent of late romanticism. Domesticity and its discontents, education and its oracular effects equally complicate popular readings of female-authored fictional works. What Mary Shelley articulates as “female” marginalization is further complicated by Charlotte Brontë. Villette in particular has been privileged as the text that most thoroughly investigates the female writer as marginalized subject. Set in the typically Gothic “foreign” space, Villette demonstrates with breathtaking concision the ways Lucy Snowe’s national affiliation to Britain, no matter how vexed by gender, is determined by xenophobia. Providing a transitional text into Victorian ideologies of gender, Brontë’s work articulates romantic ideals of identity, demonstrating similar xenophobic paradigms that inform early Victorian culture.
Reading women’s work without understanding how technologies of race and gender inform representation is a lot like imagining that one’s desires originate from oneself. There is no “outside” space in which to place the arena of women’s work; to imagine that such writing is not a product of the same kinds of ideologies informing men’s work is simplistic. To imagine that such work can remain “outside” the parameters of gender is also obfuscating. There is a significant body of work done by scholars of gender studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies that has established the ways gender often mediates strategies of othering. What is less clearly established is the rendering of gender into a thing capable of such agency. Looking at the production of women’s writing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century discloses the same xenophobic systems that structure imperialism in the works of male authors. The reification of gender roles in the eighteenth century may have allowed women to claim an “agency” that discouraged them from questioning the xenophobic construction of national identity. Even the most overt appeals to end slavery, cast by Ann Yearsley, Hannah More, and others, do not question the deeply embedded structures of xenophobia within the frame of Britishness. Even if she chastises British “fancy” as the underlying material “cause” of slavery in her “Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,” for example, Yearsley does not critique the system that produces a “renegade Christian” slavemaster.
Demonstrating the ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality and nationalism inform and get informed by xenophobic drives, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, lays the groundwork for the institutionalization of xenophobia and provides compelling evidence for the argument that romanticism may have been extension of rather than an antidote to ideologies of conquering “nature” and “other.” In the next chapter I discuss how thirty-six years later, Johnson codified xenophobic drives within the parameters of lexicography.
1 Institutionalizing Xenophobia:Johnson's Project
How does language get institutionalized? Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language and his Preface to this project address some of the strategies involved in standardizing language. Embedded in Johnson’s Preface are ideas that reflect his understanding of language as a cultural barometer. Johnson’s invectives against the loose “license” of translators who destroy the integrity of language and his desires to preserve the purity of language by using pre-Restoration writers (the “pure sources of genuine diction”) as authoritative examples for his definitions together demonstrate an interest in keeping English (language) for the English. It is somewhat surprising, then, given the vehemence with which he treats these ideas, to remember that his first published novel was a translation of the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit, Father Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia.
The apparent conflict between the ideas about language he represented in the Preface (1755) and the book he published in his early years (1733) is not especially problematic: given the enormous breadth of Johnson’s work, it would be surprising if his ideas about literature and language didn’t alter with time. More interesting, however, is the fact that when Johnson dwelled on the putative dangers of translation in the Preface he was referring particularly to translators of French, even though his early translation of Father Lobo was from the French and his later version of the “Oriental tale,” Rasselas, published only four years after the Dictionary, was heavily influenced by Voltaire’s Candide. It seems, then, that for Johnson, the French are crucially implicated in a strategy of othering: their place is somewhere between the “pure sources of genuine diction” that define Englishness and the “mingled jargon” that describes the language of Indian traders. That the genre of the “Oriental tale” was probably French in origin also suggests a metonymic connection of the French to more outlandish oriental exoticism.1
Johnson’s translation of Father Lobo and The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, both written under trying circumstances,2 illustrate an eighteenth-century use of the “Orient” as an effective screen onto which to project English fantasies about the exotic. This use of the “Orient,” not altogether limited to the eighteenth century, may have been crucially negotiated by an infamous British francophobia. In the case of Rasselas (and those Rambler essays featuring Seged), exoticism—which had little to do with actual representations of Oriental countries—had an educational and moral edge. Although many of the French Oriental tales functioned as parables whose moral purposes were duly translated into English, for Johnson such narratives may also have been possible because, as Rasselas’s Pekuah says (a propos of the specters inhabiting the Pyramids), “our entrance is no violation of their privileges; we can take nothing from them, how can we offend them?”3 In other words, the function of the “Oriental tale” in England was, in part, to provide a different kind of backdrop (French/Oriental) onto which one could throw into sharp relief the moral lessons of English nationalism that would advocate cultural separation. After all, like the protagonist of Voltaire’s Candide who concluded “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Rasselas and his company decide to return to Abyssinia rather than take up residence elsewhere. The other simultaneously circumvents the potential threat of national and cultural miscegenation and upholds the English ideology by keeping itself at bay. Also important to the eighteenth-century sensibility was the belief that tourism was “no violation”; that the fantasy about cultural purity (“we can take nothing from them, how can we offend them?”) was maintained on both ends, English and other; that the intermingling of cultural standpoints, at least in the context of travel, afforded few problems.
But, clearly, there were problems with this form of exchange. Rather early in the novel, Rasselas asks:
By what means … are the Europeans thus powerful? or why, since they can easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiatics and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither. (91)
Imlac replies:
They are more powerful, sir, than we … because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as man governs other animals. But why their knowledge is more than ours, I know not what reason can be given, but the unsearchable will of the Supreme Being. (91)
The reasonable question Rasselas poses is dismissed by Imlac’s irrational (to postcolonial readers) answer. This answer, however, is informed by the English (and European) belief that their epistemological stature is unassailable; the only СКАЧАТЬ